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Wednesday, September 6, 2017

Vintage Card Of The Month: 1948 Topps Magic Billy The Kid

This
month’s VCoM comes from one of Topps earliest oddball sets, the 1948 Topps
Magic release. The 1948 set was made up of 252 cards from sports and non-sports
categories and were quite unique in the fact that the card fronts were blank
and you got to “develop” the card yourself in a similar fashion to Polaroid film.

After
you opened your pack of Hocus Bubble Gum you took your tiny, stamp sized card
and dipped it in water. You then laid the wrapper across the blank front of the
card, pressed for 10 seconds and then lifted and voila the card had a picture.

This
Billy the Kid card is card #7 on the category “S” checklist, which is the
Figures of the Wild West portion of the set. Each category was given a letter
or number designation and then the cards were numbered based upon that specific
checklist. Category “A” checklist was basketball players, category “B” was
football players and this ran through Category “T" for general sports athletes.
You never knew who you got until you opened the pack but some of the big names
in the set were Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Charles Lindberg, George Patton and this
guy Billy the Kid.

These
cards are very condition sensitive with many of the images fading over the
years but my card is very bold and the details are very clear. I really am not
a fan of mini cards and these cards are not much bigger than a US stamp but I
will make an exception from time to time and this is one of those exceptions.

About Me

I started collecting as a kid but by the time I hit my teens my interests were elsewhere. I returned to the hobby in 1992, just in time to see the junk wax era go in to full swing. My collecting interests have changed over the past 25 years and I prefer to focus on just a couple of players.

My collection is very specific now because I want to keep it controlled and organized, I now focus mainly on my Ken Griffey Jr. & Jay Buhner collections.